31 March 2009

What to Expect From X-Men Origins: Wolverine

When: 01 May 2009

Who is in it: As you can see from the poster, the characters included have more to do with "cool characters that haven't gotten their shot at the spotlight yet," than they have to do with established Weapon X folk. This includes fan favorites Gambit, Emma Frost, and Deadpool, and because they treated him so well in the X-Trilogy - Cyclops. Oh, and no X-Film would be complete without more Wolverine. We also get Sabretooth (forget that he was already in X-Men played by someone else), The Blob, Agent Zero AKA Maverick, Kestrel, Silver Fox, and of course, Bolt (not Beak). Maybe next we will get an Angel film featuring Cable, Bishop, and Psylocke.

What to expect: Just to be clear, I am one of the people who thinks X3 got a bad rap. Sure they messed up the Phoenix story big time, and the movie in no way reached its near infinite potential, but it was still better than X1 (though obviously it fell short of X2). And for perspective, in the world of superhero 3quels, I would take X3 over Batman Forever or Superman 3 any day. Having said all of that, I am not that "X-cited" for this movie. I just kind of feel like I have already seen the Wolverine origin in X2. Also, it just looks like a big jumble of characters with not too much of a compelling story.

Hopefully I will be proven wrong, but I don't think I am alone in my thinking. I am going to predict that Wolverine falls short of $200 million at the box office landing in the $185 range. No matter how the movie performs, Fox is going to keep churning out X-Spinoffs to retain the rights to the X-Men franchise (Coming Soon, Jubilee Goes to College). So, we may or may not see a Deadpool or Wolverine 2 film, but its going to be a long time before Wolverine finds his way into the establishing Marvel Movie Universe. Sadly, that means no Hulk vs Wolverine on the big screen for us.Links:Official Site, Lots of Media